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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Exocist" data-source="post: 9848236" data-attributes="member: 7044810">I will rate skill powers even if they aren’t for Warlock skills. If you really want the skill power, you can get training in the skill by background or MC. I will, however, only rate skill powers of note because most of them suck.<h4>Level 2:</h4>[SPOILER="Level 2 Utility Powers"]Warlock powersEthereal Stride: Gets you out of melee (or into melee if you’re trying to get between enemies for a close burst) and a minor defense boost. 3 squares is a bit short, which is its only problem, but its enough to trigger Shadow Walk at least.Spectral Fade: Rated assuming you have good stealth. This power does a couple of things - lets you avoid OAs and gives you CA. End of your turn is not a good duration, but you can use that temporary invisibility to hide after moving, and then shadow walk should maintain your hidden state because you have concealment. Otherwise it’s just a minor action CA this turn power.Assassin’s Bane: Daily U2s usually have issues in the fact that utilities usually fill your action economy, and a daily U2 doesn’t really do that because its your only utility, so once you use it, its not filling your economy for the rest of the day. A daily U10 or U16 is much more acceptable in that regard. The power itself is fine if you layer it on top of another zone to prevent enemies shifting or teleporting out, but for a daily its not great.Caiphon’s Leap: The trigger is awkward (melee attack only and the enemy has to be cursed as well), it reduces the damage by an insignificant amount, it’s IR so the teleport doesn’t negate the attack. This can work against melee double taps by teleporting you away before the second attack.Devil’s Trade: It’s called Devil’s Trade because you’re getting screwed. “Minor Action” is the killer here - most of the worst conditions you want to save out of won’t let you use that minor action in the first place, and do you really want to be using this as your one action while dazed? Vuln 5 all is a nasty downside. It can be offset by e.g. also boosting your defenses with Warlock’s Wrath, but the upside of this power is not particularly good even without that downside.Fey Bargain: Doesn’t do enough for the minor action. +2 to one attack roll is a 10% chance to do something every time you use this. The downside might not show up, or it might suddenly cripple you when a monster whips out the stunned (save ends). Even if this didn’t have a downside it would still be purple.Spider Scuttle: This should probably be rated as a non-combat power, I can’t imagine needing this in combat. Can technically be used in combat, moving at full speed when you crawl might show up.Stony Roots: You don’t really need this unless you’re a defender hybrid, and even then you probably have more generically useful options. This is just too specific and too weak at what it does to be a daily.Wrathful Aspect: Doubles as a skill boosting power (see Beguiling Tongue). The damage when enemies hit you with a melee attack starts out low and just gets worse rapidly from there.Charm of Hearts: Take Ethereal Stride, it will do almost the same thing for you most of the time, but as an encounter power instead of a daily.Eyes of the Spider Queen: I assume this is meant to let you see invisible creatures that are adjacent to you, rather than just creatures that are adjacent to you (something you could presumably already do). Warlock has close attacks, those don’t care about invisibility, so the benefits of this are marginal. Especially for a daily.Fiendish Resilience: 5+CON temporary is probably a healing surge worth of value for CON-Locks when you get this, and rapidly gets worse from there. As an encounter power this would be great, as a daily its terrible.Shade Twin: Daily power that has a 55% chance of ending whenever it does the miniscule damage. Pass.Shadow Blend: You have shadow walk, you don’t really need this.Beguiling Tongue: This is going to be a standard rating for all of these skill boosting powers. Unless your GM lets you use the “Intimidate to Surrender” option in which case this is probably somewhere past gold because that option is broken, then the only use for this is out of combat. 4e non-combat DCs are typically not very high, and this only affects skills you’ll likely already be good enough at to pass moderate DCs on a 1 and hard DCs on an 8, but if you find yourself making hard checks often enough you might want something like this.Ruinous Phrase: Can’t really see a situation where you’d need something like this and couldn’t just hit the thing? Rated pink for being a non combat power.Shadow Veil: See Beguiling Tongue. Stealth is not a skill you’ll typically be good at because you don’t want high dex, so this might be more beneficial, but applying to one skill instead of 3 is worse.Favored Certainty of Caiphon: See Beguiling Tongue except this is a daily applying to all skill checks.Skill PowersFast Hands: One of the best powers in the game if your DM has banned the Disembodied Hand/Rakshasa claw method. Warlocks have a lot of items they’d like to have in their off hand, and using two minors to stow, then draw is just too expensive.Stay Back: You do need to be holding a sunrod which limits the usefulness of this to just a few levels before you really want an offhand item instead, but this gives a close burst 20 of enemies taking a -2 to attack rolls.Iron Resurgence: This is expensive to use, no doubt, but the ability to spend healing surges in combat is very limited at low levels and this can save your (or an ally’s - particularly your leader’s) bacon.Inspiring Fortitude: For CON-locks this might be okay for a few levels at least. That much temporary hitpoints can really turn the tide of a fight at this low level, even if it needs a standard to use. Definitely retrain it by level 5ish at most.Arcane Mutterings: See Beguiling Tongue. Might be considerable for CON-Locks, CHA-Locks should probably have these skills at a decent range already and not need this power. Though you could have boosted Arcana with High Imaskar background or something.Secrets of the City: See Beguiling Tongue. Though you should have three of these skills be reasonable already because you’re an INT class, and its a bit more specific because it needs you to be in a city.[/SPOILER]<h4>Level 6:</h4>[SPOILER="Level 6 Utility Powers"]Warlock PowersMirror Darkly: This power does a lot of things - you can pop it in the middle of a cluster of enemies for close burst or close blast targeting, it makes you insubstantial so its a defensive power, and the teleport aftereffect, while probably the least impactful part of the power, can also be quite helpful.Fate’s Frayed Threads: If you often find yourself minor action choked this effectively trades an immediate for a minor, which is fine. It can help your tempo, particularly if you can manage to use it before your first turn.Iron Aspect of Dispatar: Resist 5 all is a decent amount at the level you get this, but falls off pretty quickly. This is fine for level 6, but I’d retrain out of it by level 10 at the latest.Racing Fire of Ulban: It’s a lot of movement.Unspeakable Bond: The benefits of this are pretty nice - +2 to attack, +5 to damage is better than what Warlords are giving with Adaptive Stratagem at this level. Unfortunately, the duration being until the end of your next turn makes this init dependent, as the buff can just wear off without doing anything if init order is unfavourable. It is also reliant on an enemy damaging you rather than something that can be used proactively. Spreading the damage around the party helps with surge economy.Dark One’s Own Luck: Rerolls are good, even daily, they can help landing an important attack.Fey Switch: Being ranged 10 (therefore provoking) instead of close burst 10 makes this a lot worse. Can’t really swap your defender into position, instead you can only swap yourself into position for your own close attack… by putting your melee characters out of position. Mirror Darkly will often do what this does but better.Shadowslip: It’s a bit better than Caiphon’s Leap - better trigger condition (melee or ranged, enemy doesn’t need to be cursed), bigger teleport. You need to be missed by an attack anyway, so IR vs II doesn’t matter here. Best used to cancel the second attack of an elite or solo double tap, can be used as repositioning in a pinch.Life Siphon: Rated assuming you have either pact rider. It’s a 10% chance to do anything every time you use the power. The temporary hitpoints (or real hitpoints) aren’t that big, might save a surge or two over the day if you use this every encounter, but they don’t scale well.Chaos Armor: Resist 10 to one damage type EoE is not worth a daily. The other effect only works if enemies hit you during your turn so if you take an OA for 14 damage, you get to do 4 damage in return to one enemy. Great trade…Mercurial Form: Being un-markable is kind of whatever, the second benefit might show up once in a campaign at best, and escaping grabs is easy by just teleporting (like with Ethereal Stride) or pushing the attacker. All that to say nothing this power does is particularly useful or warranting of a daily.Red Leeches of Nihal: At best worth one surge per day. I like how the flavour text implies you will use this on a foe, but 95% of the time an ally will be the one triggering this.Shadow Ride: I can’t imagine a situation where you’d want this? Unless you specifically need to be on that enemy’s space for the best close burst/blast targeting, but even then there’s a downside - the enemy chooses where you’re going to end up on their turn, which is a bad idea. And it’s a move action not a minor action.Shroud of Black Steel: The benefits are not that big, the penalty can be a problem. Using a power and a daily to sidegrade yourself with minor effects is not a good idea.Spider Climb: Aside from being a non-functional power as written (it costs a move action to use so… you aren’t moving, which means it doesn’t actually do anything), even assuming it works how the author presumably intended it to, its just worse than Spider Scuttle.Spider Queen’s Caress: +2 to stealth and saves, EoE. Yuck.Walk Through Darkness: Its effect is technically better than Racing Fire of Ulban, but not better enough to warrant being a daily instead of an encounter power.Astral Eyes: See Beguiling Tongue.Rending Fear of Khirad: Yeah its the classic Zone of Truth spell. Campaign specific on if it’ll be useful.Sand Shape: Technically can be used in combat but you shouldn’t. This is an out of combat utility scouting power because you can’t attack while you’re sand.Skill PowersPrescient Maneuver: More for defender hybrids, but works for all warlocks that took Eldritch Strike. Being an immediate interrupt means you can use it to either move to the space where an artillery is shifting (thus cancelling their shift) or move adjacent to an enemy the moment they start moving, getting a free OA.Timely Dodge: An attack misses you, encounter power. Oh, and you get some free movement too. Great power.Everybody Move: AoE push to set up other AoEs and push things into zones. Can’t really enhance the push distance easily though.Swift Recovery: This is usually a good power to pick up early and retrain later but the melee distance and minor action requirement makes it very painful for you to use.[/SPOILER]<h4>Level 10:</h4>[SPOILER="Level 10 Utility Powers"]Warlock PowersDestiny Inversion: Rated assuming one of three things: you have Strength of Enduring Pain (probably from Secrets of Belial), you have things that let you save against OGD before taking it (Silver Sky Tabard/Blood Jewel/etc.) or you have allies who can grant saves (Mark of Healing/etc.). This can effectively negate all the damage from a single attack, or give you a massive damage bonus in the case of Enduring Pain, once per encounter. Which is quite good.Ethereal Sidestep: Rated assuming some teleport optimisation, base power is not that good. With an incisive dagger and eladrin boots this can easily teleport you more than your base speed, and with a Cloak of Translocation you’ll have a near-permanent +2 AC and Ref from doing that.Troublesome Aid of Caiphon: This is straight up just an extra healing surge every encounter. The “downside” shouldn’t matter.Bridge of Shades: Power is better than it looks, as it works on any movement including forced movement, meaning easier enemy grouping by using portals. This power also goes infinite with a number of other things (e.g. Summon Hell Hound) by putting the portals vertically aligned with each other. Otherwise its a neat movement power to get your melee combatants into place easier, though be careful as enemies can use it too.Brimstone Caress: The strangely common warlock leader power. The ally damage is not that high, if you often find yourself needing to reposition your allies this is not too bad.King’s Step: It’s like mashing together Fate’s Frayed Thread and Shadowslip with a better trigger. Yes the movement does provoke but enemies can’t OA on their own turn so you should be safe when using this. Unfortunately 10th is a much more competitive level.Transcendent Dance: Okay its a pretty big bonus to speed and saves but it can be hard to know when to use this proactively for the save bonus (again most things that you’d want to save out of prevent you using it in the first place), so most of the time you’re just popping this for the speed and hoping the save bonus comes up, and in that case its not great. There are much cheaper movement options available to you.Accursed Souls: Might be marginally good if you can group up a bunch of cursed enemies 1/day, it’s a free action so you can’t expect too much, but being a free action it doesn’t work on the triggering creature as free actions are reaction speed.Curse of Nessus: Just a strange power. -5 to saves is in the realm of getting big enough to care, but the trigger is weird. Most powers only inflict save ends on hit (dailies will tend to inflict UEoNT on miss) and this requires you to miss with a power to use it so… when exactly are you thinking this will work?Duelist’s Dance: IR so it can’t avoid attacks, teleport 3 only, at a very competitive level. Also a daily.Shade Dance: Might as well read “you become insubstantial until the end of the encounter”. The question is “how many healing surges does this save you” and the answer is… probably not a lot.Shielding Shades: This is probably one healing surge worth of value per day, can be more if you use it on a crit or an encounter power. Also it can extend your health bar better than Bond of Brotherhood can, but you should still take Troublesome Aid or Destiny Inversion instead of this.Smothering Darkness: You pop this and stand in it, the enemies proceed to ignore you. Not at all worth a daily slot.Spined Devil’s Boon: The melee retaliation is not worth much. The fly speed might still see some use for getting you out of range of enemies who only have melee options. Still not very good.Bond of Brotherhood: One surge worth of value per day, take Troublesome Aid instead.Darkest Mirror: Take more area/close attacks and you don’t need this power.Murky Deep: Probably one of the worst movement powers I’ve ever seen, it does slow enemies in a fairly sizeable burst but slow is rapidly becoming irrelevant.Shadow Armor: +2 to all defenses EoE isn’t worth a u10 daily, and everything else it does is not good either.Warlock’s Leap: Daily teleport 6, you have better options available to you at this point if you find yourself needing this sort of thing.Ambassador Imp: You should probably just tell your ritual caster to use Sending. If you don’t have a ritual caster, someone should take the feat for Comrades’ Succor at least.Shadow Form: Similar to Sand Shape, this is purely an out of combat power. Go back and take Sand Shape, then take a better power at this level, if you’re seriously considering this.Skill PowersStall Tactics: The “win initiative” power. There’s not much to say about this one, it’s popular for initiative optimisation as it practically always lets your entire party go first to lay down some degenerate combo on the enemy side before any of them get to do anything.Time Out: Your friendly warden will love you (don’t take this without one).[/SPOILER]<h4>Level 16:</h4>[SPOILER="Level 16 Utility Powers"]Warlock PowersHero’s Defense: This usually reads “make an attack miss you” which is great as an enc power.Offering of Blood: It’s expensive health wise, but an encounter reroll is still an encounter reroll. If you have important attacks that need to hit, this has you covered. Also its not irreducible damage, though its untyped so its not going to be easy to reduce it.Painful Transference: No Action is what makes this a winner. The health cost is not that high either - getting rid of stun, unconscious, dominate, whatever is amazing. Downside? It only works on (save ends) stuff. Won’t help you in the slightest against EoNT.Vile Resonance: Rated only assuming you have the pact rider to add a slide 1 to all your attacks and you’re abusing zones. The tradeoff is not worth it otherwise, you do 7 (maybe 9 if you have the feat to make your curse dice d8s) more damage once, and take 5 more damage a bunch of times. Diabolic Escape: Fairly sizeable teleport, and vuln fire can be good if your party has fire optimisation (you might also have some fire stuff), though most of the time you’re going to be using this to get somewhere rather than get out of somewhere.Fail Me Not: Another leader warlock power. Only to melee and ranged attacks sucks a bit - nearly all of your melee and ranged attacks are bad, so this is rated assuming your party has enough melee and ranged attacks with multiple damage rolls to make good use of this. Sustain minor is a sting.Guise of the Laughing Fool: This is more for Paladin hybrids or other defender hybrids than normal warlocks, forcing enemies to take mark punishes as they can’t attack you. Unfortunately area and close attacks start getting significantly more common and this does nothing against those.Heart of the Storm: Due to the lack of keywords on this, it’s very hard to make the push distance any more than 1. Most of those only work on powers with specific keywords. Would be great if you could enhance it, without the ability to do that its merely okay.Infuriating Elusiveness: Smaller teleport than Diabolic Escape which makes it worse as an engagement tool unless you stack some enhancers, but invisibility can still be nice for CA, even if the prevalence of AoE on monsters makes the -5 to hit you less reliable. You do go invisible before the teleport if you want to hide.Death Shroud Aspect: Not bad but usually going to be worse than Destiny Inversion or Hero’s Defense.Caiphon’s Disquieting Liberty: Realistically none of these conditions should matter to you all that much. If they do, Ethereal Sidestep with +teleport also works against all of these conditions.Reaper’s Vengeance: Cool power but IR makes this worse for engaging enemies than it should be (Diabolic Escape or Infuriating Elusiveness will be fair more consistent) as it relies on that far away enemy damaging you with an attack first. The obscurement zone can be a big help if your party is stacked up on area or close attacks, or it can hinder them.Amaan’s Continuance: Not that this can’t do something, but there’s better ways to achieve a similar effect to this, and it doesn’t prevent you from dying. GMs targeting downed PCs is usually considered bad form unless they’re free to catch in an AoE, but this power leaves you up so the same thing may not apply to you. Even if you assume the GM won’t target you, its still a very specific power whose effect can be achieved by items or other powers (take defensive stuff to not get downed in the first place).Cloak of Shadow: Skip your next turn. Pass.Eye of the Warlock: Duration is questionable on this one. The only listed duration is for the third eye, which is in a separate sentence so the save ends might just be for the third eye and not for the other effects. RAW, the entire power is (save ends). If your GM rules the entire power is save ends or end of encounter, its pretty bad. If your GM rules it’s until extended rest, then this is actually a great power that you can slap on your defender to use close bursts from their space. If your GM rules the duration is forever then I don’t know what is happening in your game.Ruinous Resistance: If this just gave you resist 15 to one damage type EoE it would still be red. The fact that it also makes your ally vulnerable sucks. Maybe better for hybrid defenders but still pretty awful for them.Soul of the Void: It’s better than Amaan’s Continuance. Does that make it good? No.Warp Space: Cool minor action. Wait its a standard? That’s awful.Skill PowersInsightful Riposte: +3 to the attack roll to force a miss into a hit. Free action so it doesn’t interfere with your action economy.[/SPOILER]<h4>Level 22:</h4>Take another u16 at this level.[SPOILER="Level 22 Utility Powers"]Warlock PowersCerulean Shield: If you end up in an encounter where enemies are all doing typed damage (somewhat? Common by epic) then this can be reasonable. I still don’t think it’s going to be better for your surge situation than another u16 though.Entropic Ward: “Enemies go attack someone else for one turn”. Might be reasonable for Paladin hybrids but this is epic, you can juice your base defenses so high through itemisation that you don’t need this.Master of Magic: Three options and none of them are remotely close to being u22 daily worthy. Rated better than the red powers solely because its not actively detrimental to use.Ulban’s Shining Cloak: Way too specific. Ranged attack only, and the “benefit” of reflecting the attack is usually not gonna amount to much. Go back and take Hero’s Defense. If you already have it, take Destiny Inversion, if you already have that too, take Troublesome Aid.Wakeman’s Invocation: You get to cancel a melee attack against you as an II for the rest of the encounter. Might as well read “you won’t be melee attacked for the rest of the encounter”. Does little against ranged attacks, and nothing against areas or close attacks.Wall of Inky Night: Standard to move really kills this. The wall’s effects are… well they’re not what I’d call u22 daily worthy, but they’re okay.Wings of the Fiend: Buy an item to give yourself a permanent fly speed.Ascension of the Elder: Why in the hell would you want this? It probably gets you out of range of everything but you can just buy a fly speed at this level and do that yourself. Also, it puts you out of range of everything.Expedient Sacrifice: Go back to U10 and take Transcendent Dance which gives you a bigger bonus to speed, a bonus to saves and doesn’t debuff your ally.Raven’s Glamour: Ends if you attack. At u22. Really?Walk of the Kantarkaran: Skip your next turn, you can’t make OAs so enemies can trivially walk away and attack someone else. Hard pass.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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